If you’re the type of owner who asks if you can bring your dog along to a weekend getaway, maybe you should think twice.flyzone/iStockPhoto / Getty Images
Dianne Rinehart is a writer and owner of the perfectly well-behaved Daisy.
I once stayed over at a friend’s place when my dog was about a year old.
I wasn’t worried. She’s amazingly well-behaved. But a few days after leaving, I learned that Daisy had left a pile of poo in my host’s rec room.
I was mortified. It was so unlike Daisy – why had she done this?
The answer, as it often goes with pets, was: Who knows! The point is that we don’t really know what our dogs are going to do at someone else’s home or cottage.
So, if you’re the type of owner who asks if you can bring your dog along to that dinner party or for a weekend getaway, maybe you should think twice.
As my friend, Leslie Grant – who owns two lab-husky siblings, Dot and Watson, as well as a cottage on Georgian Bay where she often hosts guests and their dogs – warns: “Our angel dogs are not always angels in a new environment.”
Tell me about it.
Moving in together, with pets? Here are 3 tips for making your blended pet family work
Recently, I held a dinner party for three girlfriends. Two of them brought their dogs, one of which was an angel. The other, a sweet golden retriever named Finnegan, turned out be a devil dog.
One second, I was accepting a gift of wine from my friend, and the next thing I knew she was screaming like a madwoman. I turned to see her beast with his paws up on the counter, a massive wedge of creamy blue cheese in his mouth.
He did not want me to take what was now a mushy, gooey mess out of his maw. But I didn’t want him to expire from a cheese overdose on my watch.
It didn’t end there. (We all wished it had.)
I pulled a pork tenderloin out of the oven to a chorus of screams: Look out! He’s beside you! I put it on the cutting board, the screams getting louder. Move it back from the counter edge, he’s in there again!
As I prepared to serve the meal, I looked in vain for the baguette that was on the counter. We all looked at Finnegan. Unbelievable. Not a crumb was left.
House parties can be stressful, but at least the dog leaves at the end of the night – but what happens when your now-devil dog is staying with you at your friend’s cottage?
“Just because your dog doesn’t go on the furniture at home, doesn’t mean he won’t be drawn to your host’s favourite cream-coloured couch,” my friend Leslie says from experience.
And just because your dog doesn’t table surf doesn’t mean Dot and Watson won’t, she warns. “If there is food on the table, my dogs will find it.”
And there’s another, scarier aspect. While a cottage owner’s dog may be trained about the perils of other creatures inhabiting the land and water, a city dog might not.
Pet owners skip vet visits as affordability concerns grow, survey finds
Toronto’s Maureen Moyer can identify with that fear. While hosting guests at her cottage, one of her invitee’s dogs – a puppy named Holly – was bitten by a rattlesnake.
Much Benadryl later, they thought she would be okay. Not so. The next day, it was a mass emergency exodus from the island cottage by boat to Parry Sound’s dog hospital.
Maureen remembers: “They were waiting with a puppy-sized gurney and IVs. It was touch and go,” and even more so because it happened to be a day when the entire Eastern seaboard had lost electricity. “The hospital was on generators.”
Three days later, Holly was released – but it was a while, still, before she was her healthy self.
My friend Fred Holmes’s dogs have learned to give the bears that wander around his family cottage lots of room. (Snakes? Pshaw!) And they know, too, that while it might be fun to swim out to bark at fishermen or swimming deer, they have to come back before they drown. Will your dog?
Even without the dangers of predators, there’s still etiquette involved, says Leslie.
“When your host says, ‘Of course, Rufus is welcome,’ check their temperature. Ask the spouse. Know who really means it and who doesn’t,” she advises.
“Few things bring us as much joy as watching dogs run freely at a cottage. But if you want to ensure a return invite, know the house rules.”
First one: Don’t poo in the rec room.